Right off the bat, readers of Ian Botham's second autobiography have to come to terms with a crushing disappointment. The 1994 original came with one of the greatest titles of any sporting memoir; in recent times, it has only been challenged in its triumphant idiocy by If I Did It from OJ Simpson. My Autobiography: Don't Tell Kath ... was a tongue-in-cheek reference to his wife, a redoubtable woman whose name is inevitably prefixed by the adjective 'long-suffering', and acknowledged the fact that she would typically find out about his bad behaviour on England cricket tours by reading the tabloids. We have to assume that such quips have subsequently worn a little thin in the Botham household, perhaps not helped when the News of the World revealed a two-year affair that Beefy started in 1999 with a 31-year-old Australian waitress called Kylie.

Now the just-knighted Botham is back with the more sober Head On: The Autobiography, although this one might be more accurately subtitled Do Tell Kath ... It has often been noted that 'sorry' is not a word in the Botham vocabulary, but the book reads like one of the most drawn-out apologies ever committed to print. 'She is the heartbeat of our life, our work and our family,' he writes. 'Strong-willed, quick-witted and a real grafter.' OK, it sounds like he is detailing the qualities of a dependable opening batsman rather than a wife who has stuck by him for 31 tumultuous years, but it's as close as you will get to a glimpse of Botham's sensitive side.

The liaison with Kylie is probably the most scandalous new ground covered in the book, but there is a fair amount of overlap with the first autobiography. This is a familiar concern with sports fans - 27-year-old Michael Owen has already written two memoirs and it is a terrifying prospect how many a prodigy like Wayne Rooney will eventually notch up. However, Botham is far more deserving of a retrospective and even if there is some repetition, it is not entirely unwelcome.

A tour through Botham's career certainly gives an instructive reminder of how much the game of cricket has changed in recent years. When he made his Test debut against Australia in 1977, he was paid £210 for the five-day match and the pre-game preparation was far from the ascetic world of today's players (i.e., they could go to a strip club and not have to pretend they had wandered in by mistake). When he played for Queensland in Australia's Sheffield Shield in the Eighties, they attempted to impose a curfew and a drinking ban. Botham reports: 'I just laughed and said, "Forget it. If I don't have a drink, I can't get to sleep, and if I don't sleep, I'll be no good for the team." I saw no reason to alter a personal regime' - an inspired choice of word - 'that had stood me in good stead over the years.'

One thing that Head On makes clear is that Botham is next to useless as a role model for aspiring cricketers. Throughout his life, he felt claustrophobic playing in the nets (that's what he claimed) and, as a result, he admits: 'There was probably no one in English professional cricket who practised less than I did.' He disliked watching the sport, apart from his great friend Viv Richards and David Gower, and he never had any interest in analysing statistics or collecting souvenirs. Regular viewers of BBC's A Question of Sport, on which Botham was a long-time captain, will remember just how little interest he appeared to take in his profession.

Botham, it seems, took advantage of a natural talent and achieved the rest through a formidable exercise of will. At one point, he tries to explain what is perhaps the defining facet of his career: how he would bowl a terrible ball and take a wicket, while anyone else would be blasted for four. He eventually attributes it to aggression and 'ticker', before concluding, somewhat gnomically: 'I held on to the tail of my own personal tiger and it took me on an extraordinary ride.'

Head On is unlikely to supplant Mike Brearley's The Art of Captaincy as a seminal text on the sport's tactics. Even by the standards of English cricket, Beefy had an abysmal record as leader and is a deficiency with which he is still wrestling. As with many sporting greats, it must come down to a fundamental inability to understand that his team-mates were not programmed as he was. Pity the player who approached Botham in search of reassurance: 'My reaction was likely to be, "If you don't want to play, fine. Fuck off and we will get someone who does."' None the less, it is hard not to feel a little nostalgic as he delivers one of his typically blunt conclusions. 'Since when did you need a psychologist to play cricket?' he asks. 'I never took any notice of those idiots.'